 I'm Alex Korkoski, I'm a musician, violinist and researcher and I'm currently a composer in residence at the British Library Sound Archive and this residency is run by Sound and Music as part of their embedded programme. Sound and Music are an arts organisation which is funded by the Arts Council of England and they have a network of residences where they have composers and sound artists who are embedded with institutions, organisations and ensembles and this residency programme is part of that. One of the projects is around making recordings onto wax cylinders which were really the very first sort of successful means of sound recording and what I love about that really is the use of wax or a waxy substance. It has a great connection also with writing but the physical act of recording is very close to writing if you like, it's making traces on wax which again is a connection with the very early forms or ancient forms of recording wax tablets from ancient times and some examples from Roman times to exist. So this idea of sound writing, I wanted to explore that and I've invited a selection of poets to record their works directly onto cylinders so this has also a reference to those very, very early recordings from the very late 1880s and 1890s of Alfred or Tennyson or Whitman, the poets who recorded who were invited to record for the wax cylinder medium. Daughters, dead starlings, bizarre, Mrs Knight's seven eye witnesses heard the impact, the grounds instinct is to swallow terrifying blood. The idea is that these are one-of-a-kind objects, the physical objects enter the archive collections and they are also transferred and digitised and they will also be available for people to listen to online. The techniques are a little bit more difficult, it's quite easy to make a very bad recording as we know with it, all kinds of technology but yes, you learn by doing, by basically making lots and lots of mistakes, I've been doing this over 15 years now and each time it's different, you're working with different kinds of waxes, different atmospheric conditions. What's also fascinating to me about this particular medium of recording onto wax and acoustically is that it's very much an impression of a sound, it's a very impressionistic form that you have to listen also through a lot of noise because of the actual process of actually cutting through, plowing through wax material that comes also with a lot of noise from the medium itself and so you are listening through this noise so it's a different, also a different kind of listening and I find that very fascinating that you actually have to sort of listen through this curtain of noise if you like, well it's a pattern of noise. Dead Starly, beat the fat, bitter like that, wouldn't it? Sick, all voluntary sounds are the product of thought, the sound of ua, the suit is the dominant phonic and the beat is both man and ace. That most high picks up and comes via the song. You give names who are intimately broken, nice, like the silver, horizon. As well as recording wax cylinders in the studios, I will be doing some live in the public space in the British Library, working with poets and actors, it gives an opportunity for the public and for the British Library, really, staff and technicians actually to see the process, it gives also people an opportunity to listen back to them, I'll also be playing them back, not only through a big horn but I'll also be playing them back through listening tubes which were actually the most common way to listen back to a cylinder recording, it is stethoscope technology, it's not assisted by electronics at all and it's quite loud and punchy sound, it's quite unexpected to what you hear from a horn for instance where a lot of the sound is lost in the air. People would congregate around a phonograph with multiple sets of earpieces and listen together so it was this kind of mixture of private and shared listening which is interesting to me. Another project I'll be working on is with the Bishop Collection, which is a collection of sound effects that go back to the 1940s and 50s that were used for theatre productions, not just the professional major British theatres but also amateur theatres. It's actually very serendipitous this project because I also have a collection of sound effects which, of early sound effects as well, actually the latest ones I have are really from, that I collect are really from the 1940s. I've been collecting them for many years now and I use them a lot in my work, in my performances when I try and create these kinds of, kind of a music concret on stage using gramophones and record players and I use a lot of sound effects for that. Some of these recordings are structured, if you hear a crowd scene or a particular harbour scene where it's being done in the studio, people shaking chains or somebody's impersonating a seagull or whatever, these are all orchestrated, it's all mapped out, it's all structured, it's scored. The Bishop Collection is absolutely fascinating because a lot of these recordings were recorded directly to disc, this is before tape recorders were very common and so many of the discs are unedited, these were the actual recordings. So what you get on these recordings are a lot of control room chatter, you hear the engineers talking to each other, communicating and that's really, really fascinating for me. Also some sounds of radio which we've lost, there's a whole sonic ecology if you like of radio sounds that are now lost, but they are recorded there, they're recording shortwave sounds and radio jamming and various things and I'll be working with them in all sorts of different ways, I'll be making my own sound collages with the works. I also want to sort of make radio programmes, but also I'm actually interested in again in using them in performance and actually trying to recreate or re-enact some of these sound effects recordings, working with some musicians, some percussionists, using some old theatre machines actually, wind machines, thunder machines, things like that to play the score that I'll make for these machines. What interests me more are the old media I work with and I also collect old recording media, blank media. I collect these because I'm also interested in the degradation if you like. Some of these have surface imperfections caused by ageing which when they're recorded on you here, that's very much part of the process if you like. Working at the British Library so far has been really amazing, there's a lifetimes worth of work, possible projects one could do here and it's very, it's like being a kid in a candy store really. It's been working with curators because it's the curators who can point you to certain recordings of certain collections, also with a technical team as well. It's actually getting involved that I find really forming these relationships and learning from them and learning about the collections through them. I think that's been the best part about it really.